Overview
A positive practice instrument for concise, inspectable, revisable work. It reads self-declared tags and evidence labels against a versioned practice registry and returns one of four statuses over declaration coverage. It measures whether the evidence a practice asks for was declared — never whether the work is true, good, or permitted; an ALIGNED reading authorizes nothing. Subtitle: A Positive Operating Discipline for Concise, Rigorous Research and Engineering Code is MIT licensed; prose and figures are CC BY 4.0. See LICENSE in the repository.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- An ALIGNED status only means every required label for each applicable practice was declared fresh, never that a source is real or a claim true.
- Label-stuffing works: a research-tagged attempt declaring all 22 vocabulary labels with no artifacts returns ALIGNED.
- Coverage is asymmetric: 27 of the 55 tag-practice cells are applicable, computed directly from the registry.
- Seeded permutation sweeps confirm that once a declaration is non-empty the status never regresses, with the empty declaration as the intentional exception.
- The author makes a design and implementation claim only; no user study or outcome comparison was run.
Methods
- Versioned registry of eleven practices with coarse evidence labels — Encodes practices such as question-first framing, source traceability, and clean reruns as 'wires', each with reviewed tags and required evidence labels.
- Staged evaluate_work evaluator returning four statuses — Validates configuration and registry, then runs intake normalization, freshness partition, tag matching, and scoring to return ALIGNED, NEEDS_EVIDENCE, NEEDS_REWORK, or OUTSIDE_SCOPE.
- Structural invariants tested against planted-bad registries — Seven invariants check the registry's own shape, each demonstrated firing on a deliberately broken registry rather than only passing on the real one.
- Executed adversarial declarations against the real evaluator — Runs label-stuffing, tag-minimization, and refresh-date laundering attacks to show how self-declared inputs can game the status.
- Three claim classes with distinct evidentiary burdens — Separates implementation, methodological, and world/authority claims so that tests or citations do not silently change the type of claim made.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
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Citation
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